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Friday, August 02, 2013

Mondays are always the worst day of the week for me. It’s so
hard to wake up in the morning after having relaxed for two days on the
weekend. To beat the Monday blues, we decided to head over to Guu Sakabar after
work for some catching up.

Guu originated in Vancouver and then opened up two locations
in Toronto, both being super successful. We headed over to Guu Sakabar, which is
on Bloor St. West while their other location Guu Izakaya is on Church.

I prefer the Bloor St. location to the Church St. location
because it seems more spacious. I may be more inclined to visit the Church
location in the winter though because they have a heated patio!

When you first walk in you'll be welcomed enthusiastically by all the employees. You'll definitely feel the Japanese hospitality. The Church St. location is usually pretty busy but they've started taking reservations so it's much easier in terms of planning your night out.

The first thing we ordered was the Nama lemon drink ($6). It’s
a DIY kind of drink because you have to squeeze the lemon juice yourself. The
good thing about that is you can control how sour your drink gets!

Monica working hard to make her drink!

Monday and Tuesdays are wing nights at Guu. You can get ½
lbs. ($5.50), 1 lbs. ($10) and 2 lbs. ($18.50). You also get to choose from the chunky
salsa, spinach garlic mayo and black sesame sauce for your wings! We decided to
share the ½ lb with the black sesame sauce. Note that when you order at least a lb, which gives you around 10 pieces of wings, you get all three sauces.

The wings tasted so good! They were
fried well and not too oily! Next time I’ll try the spinach garlic mayo sauce
instead because the black sesame sauce was a bit watery and strong for my liking.

We also ordered the Takowasabi($3.80). It’s basically raw
octopus in a wasabi dressing. I’m not a fan of wasabi so I was reluctant to try
it. Monica convinced me that you could hardly taste the wasabi… definitely not
the case! It’s a great appetizer to start with if you like wasabi but for those
of us who are more acute to spice levels, the wasabi taste is definitely very
strong.

Next on our list was the Okonomiyaki($6.80). When I was
travelling in Japan, okonomiyaki was a staple in every city but each city
tweaked their recipe a bit to make it their own. I haven’t had it since
travelling in Japan so I was pretty excited. Guu’s okonomiyaki definitely lived
up to my expectations and reminded me of Japan. It was a very generous portion
and definitely good to share with a group. The taste was just as I
remembered.

Last but not least, we had to mix in some fusion flavour to
our meal so we decided to order the Carbonara udon ($8.8)0. If you’ve only had
carbonara sauce with Italian pasta, you really need to try this udon! There’s
something about the texture and thickness of the Japanese noodle that makes
this dish so appetizing! The ratio of sauce to noodle was perfect and it wasn’t
too creamy and heavy like most carbonara sauces.

Even though we didn’t order a lot of food, it kept us very
full (almost to the point where we couldn’t finish all the food.) I would
suggest coming here with a bigger group of people because it’s much easier to
share dishes that way and try more things because they definitely have an
abundant amount of choices on their menu!